Label:
Saddle Creek
Release Date:
10/10/2004

Who are you? Where are you? What are you? The three essential questions in life. Apparently if you need to know anything else about anything else, be it alien, friend or flower then you’re asking too much. But shouldn’t we ask for more, more, more?

Be warned; seek too much more and you'll end up slipping through the cracks into some kind of revolution, representative of something you’ve inherited. But what’ve we got nowadays? Recent times have seen the birth of Nickelback, The Darkness, Staind and Puddle of Mudd. If you discount the likes of Trail of Dead, At the Drive-in and Sigur Ros, the alternative-alternative has lost its innovative way for the past decade. Nothing’s really been happening. Yet it’s all nearly happening and all it’ll take is a spark for it all to make sense and morph…

The Faint have been away for quite a while since ‘Danse Macabre’ and their frankly, not so great live show which accompanied it. Since then The Strokes have become all famous and stuff, and The Rapture have sold British-baggy back to us whilst the sensible folks at the back have been left asking: has it come to this? But it’s ok, they’ve been working in the lab with Dre and Outkast, bouyed by 9am caffeine shots, taking in some crescendo classical highlights for luncheon, rocking out to anything from Prince to Pitchshifter thru the afternoon and danced to some Warp-flavoured IDM all evening… and that’s about the jiist of this record, it’s all over the place, yet perfectly fresh and maligned.

It opens like MC5 trying to kill funk-ridden bigbeat with their laptops, moves through Marilyn Manson getting his ass remixed by Fat Boy Slim and rolls onto Aphex rocking it with Hot Hot Heat. And all these musical ideals back the lyrical tension and fear, as a translation and dichotomy of all relationships; from international terror-politik to the girl who wants to sleep alone, again, fall apart.

So, if reclaiming the streets has taught us every public space is a marketing arena, The Faint leave nothing but questions and black holes all over the global dancefloor. Go, bust a groove on a pavement near you.